The White House announced Friday it was putting a private firm in charge of fixing its faulty health insurance website and set the end of November as a target date for working out all the bugs, the first indication of how long repairs may take.
One day after contractors on the project publicly suggested that the federal government inadequately tested the site before its Oct. 1 launch, officials in the administration of President Barack Obama said that one of those contractors — Columbia, Maryland-based Quality Software Services Inc., or QSSI — would take over management of HealthCare.gov.
Jeffrey Zients, a former administration official selected by the White House to assess the extent of the online marketplace's problems, told reporters the site is "fixable." But he offered a sobering picture of the problems left to tackle, saying there are dozens of issues on a "punch list" that need to be addressed.